They spent $52 million to hide it.
We spent over $1 million to expose it.
That alone should tell you this isn’t as simple as watching your discount rate.
Your processor does not send you an invoice. They have direct access to your bank account. The money is gone before anyone reviews it.
You have 30 days to dispute a charge. Most businesses do not open their statement until the middle of the month. That leaves roughly two weeks to catch something that was engineered to be invisible.
Interchange rates and fee categories change twice a year. On average, more than 200 rules change annually. Each change arrives buried in a statement with dozens of line items, most carrying names that mean nothing unless you wrote the billing system.
Do you know the difference between the more than 20 Level III interchange rate categories across Visa and Mastercard, and exactly when each one should be assessed? It would be hard to find someone at Visa or Mastercard themselves who could answer that correctly without looking it up.
That is not an accident. It does not have to be this complicated. They made it this way. And they change the rules twice a year to make sure it stays that way.
They are the ones who believed their resources were enough.
Some of the most sophisticated companies in the world, with finance teams built specifically to catch this kind of thing, were still being overbilled millions every year. Not because their people were not good enough. Because the statements are not designed to be understood. They are designed to be accepted.
You would need to know every interchange category and the exact rate each card type should qualify at. You would need to track every fee line item month over month and flag anything that changed name, amount, or category. You would need to know the difference between a legitimate reclassification and a manufactured one. And you would need to do all of this every single month, across every location, for every statement, inside a 30-day window.
That is not a job. That is a system. And the processors spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars making sure that system does not exist on your side of the table.
Until now.